A year after his greatest rally, Zito is in line for special moment

Barry Zito stood upright on a back field at Scottsdale Stadium last April 1, searching desperately for a solution in the final hours of spring training. He was the only player in the park because the rest of the Giants had long since packed for home. He was the only one around wearing a uniform because pitching coach Dave Righetti and bullpen coach Mark Gardner, who silently watched Zito during the session, wore slacks, collared shirts and dress shoes for the flight to San Francisco.

Zito was upright because he had decided to ditch an exaggerated crouch, the latest in a series of spring tweaks meant to help the left-hander find the form that got him a seven-year deal. You only needed a quick glance at his spring stats to see why Zito was searching: 5 1/3 innings over his final two starts, with 10 runs and 16 hits allowed.

With the season fast approaching and his rotation spot in jeopardy, Zito found what he was looking for. A year later, he has found himself in line for one of the biggest honors of his Giants career.

Manager Bruce Bochy revealed Friday that Zito is tentatively scheduled to pitch the home opener on April 5, the Giants’ first official game at AT&T Park since a sweep of the Detroit Tigers.
“It’s going to be exciting,” Zito said. “It’s going to be a great vibe with the fans. It’s just a good jump-start right into the season.”

Zito’s jump-start last season will be hard to top. That terrible spring was followed by a stunning shutout of the Colorado Rockies at Coors Field in Zito’s first start of the season. It was only a sign of things to come.

Start a clubhouse conversation about the postseason and it won’t be long before the focus turns to Zito’s season-saving performance in Game 5 of the National League Championship Series. That was followed by a win over Justin Verlander and the Detroit Tigers in Game 1 of the World Series. When the series was over, Zito’s teammates honored him with a chant of “Bar-ry! Bar-ry!” as the World Series trophy was first carried into the clubhouse

There was just one problem.

“I didn’t quite understand what was going on there,” Zito said.

A champagne-soaked Zito was being taken into a conference room by an MLB official and wasn’t sure if he had heard the chant correctly.

“I knew it sounded like my name, but I didn’t know why,” Zito said. “That was surreal. It’s hard to even fathom that kind of support.”

Not if you’re one of Zito’s teammate. Zito is fervently respected for the grace he showed in the 2010 postseason, when he was left off the playoff roster but told Bochy that he would stay ready, just in case. He is lauded for his work ethic and the continued push to get better, even as fans derided a $126 million contract that Zito never came close to living up to.

As the deal winds down, it feels that all is forgiven. Zito earned postseason hero status with his Game 5 victory and inspired a Twitter movement, #RallyZito, that would carry on throughout the rest of the postseason. On the biggest of stages, Zito proved to be a big-game pitcher, and he’s looking to carry that forward.

“He found himself last year,” Bochy said. “You can tell he’s really in a good place with his confidence and he should be with the year he had.”

While announcing his tentative rotation – Matt Cain, Madison Bumgarner, Tim Lincecum, Zito and Ryan Vogelsong – Bochy stressed that the order doesn’t ultimately matter. That’s especially true in the case of Vogelsong, who will likely take the ball last but, outside of Cain, made the strongest case last season to be anointed an ace. The schedule puts Cain, Bumgarner and Lincecum in line to face the Los Angeles Dodgers in a season-opening series between two rivals poised for an epic back-and-forth.

“I’m definitely excited to get out there again and throw against that team,” Lincecum said, noting the Dodgers’ blockbuster moves.

Lincecum is followed by Zito, who will be tasked with taking the ball after a lengthy pregame commemoration of the champion Giants. Following last season’s turnaround, Zito is sure to receive one of the loudest ovations of his seven-year career in San Francisco, adding another improbable twist to a run that had so many downs before the postseason highs.

“With the year he had and some of the things he’s been through,” Bochy said, “I think that would mean a lot to him.”

71 Comments

I was at Zito’s second-to-last spring training start last year, a road game against the White Sox. I was already crabby because we’d rented a car for the 45-minute drive from Scottsdale, and the lineup included BOTH Eli Whiteside and Chris Stewart, thanks to the DH. But we had great seats, about 10 rows from the field between first base and home. So we had a really good view of what was going on. Zito was horrible. He couldn’t find the strike zone, and then when he did, they hit it like it was batting practice. Later that week, I watched his last spring training start on MLB.TV. Same thing.

I was SURE he was done, and I wasn’t surprised when they didn’t take him north and scratched his start in the Bay Bridge series. Here on this blog, we were doing over/unders of when he’d be out of the rotation and given his walking papers.

I’ve never been so surprised in my life as when Zito pitched that shutout in Colorado, especially significant because the Giants had been swept in Arizona with Lincecum, Bumgarner, and Cain starting. I watched every pitch of that game, and it was like a freakin’ miracle was unfolding. By the time he pitched that season-saving #RallyZito game in St. Louis, I wasn’t surprised anymore. I’d seen him come through in a lot of big starts that season.

So enjoy your moment, Big Z. You deserve it. I stopped believing in you, but I happily climbed back on the bandwagon, and I couldn’t be happier to be there.

Oracle (from last thread): Yeah, getting a young power pitcher for a guy you were going to lose on waivers at the end of spring training anyway is pretty sweet. Last year it was Chris Stewart for George Kontos. And let’s not forget Jonathan Sanchez for Melky Cabrera–even though that ended badly, Sabean still won that trade, big time.

Oh, and even though this isn’t a trade, let’s not forget that Juan Uribe turned into Kyle Crick. That may be the best non-sign in Sabean’s career as GM.

Very well-stated Lefty – I couldn’t say it any better than that. Most everyone had indeed given up on Zito and the debate was simply whether they should eat his contract or keep him around to do next to nothing – maybe mop-up.

Mad props to Zito for what he did in the postseason – couldn’t have won it all without him – but I find it interesting that people frequently talk about how he was left off of the 2010 playoff roster but made the 2012 playoff roster without actually comparing his two (regular) seasons. His regular season ERA was identical in 2010 and 2012 (4.15), and his IP/GS and QS% were actually BETTER in 2010 than in 2012. His winning percentage may have been better in 2012, but hard to use that as a true indicator of Z’s success.

I’m a Zito fan and pulling for him – we desperately need him to do well this season considering our lack of depth at SP – and I know stats don’t mean everything, but it’s surprising that this never comes up.

“even though this isn’t a trade, let’s not forget that Juan Uribe turned into Kyle Crick.”

Nice work Lefty 🙂 As Johnny might say : I did not know that.

CC, from last thread

“Foothills, I’d suggest you stop looking for a magic stat to make a case. HR/9 may be differentiating in the cohort that makes the playoffs. Besides thumb between the options and look at the gambit of stats. Remember, you’re not seeking to predict something, but explain something. The idea, IMO, is to take the points of difference and try to rationalize what you’ve seen in some logical fashion.”

Don’t you go flying off the rails on me young man. Who says I’m looking for a magic stat? I’ve outlayed FIP and ERA from 2012. You and anyone else is free to make their own conclusions. Did the Giants outperform their FIP? Only by a little, much like most everybody else. By just about any metric you slice with, the Giants pitching staff was around 5th best in the NL last year. Should you expect about the same this year?

Sure.

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Tip your cap to Barry Zito though. With the stuff he has, he has to pitch his heart out and earn every dollar. You try pitching in MLB without major league stuff. Takes guts. Especially when the fans turn on you and call the GM a bum for signing you. He’s got moxie. And if he can parlay that into another winning record in 2013, then start casting the bronze.

I agree with Foothills: a good point. There are two key differences. First, in 2010, Zito was excellent in the first half and terrible in the second half. We all remember his awful start in that last weekend series against the Padres in 2010 where he walked in two runs. Meanwhile, the other four starters were all pitching great in September–historically great, in fact. Zito wasn’t well-suited for the bullpen, so as only the fifth-best starter at the time, there was no place for him on the postseason roster. In 2012, Zito pitched very well in September. He was the second-best starter after Cain. Zito was definitely in the top four in 2012.

Second, Lincecum, not Zito, was the fifth-best starter in the 2012 regular season. But he had value out of the bullpen, so they used him that way (and thank God they did!). So you’re right that the overall regular season numbers were similar, but Zito’s trajectory and competition were better in 2012–and the rest is history.
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Foothills: Yeah, I just read that a few weeks ago myself. When Uribe signed with the Dodgers after 2010, the Giants got a compensatory sandwich pick for 2011. That was Kyle Crick. Given how the Uribe signing turned out for the Dodgers, just NOT having him is a win. Having Crick now be our top prospect is a win-win.

Mooose. It’s called cherry picking. The other offense is building a hypothesis around the data or using the data to make the narrative. Its what everybody does when they are talking baseball. That guy bats .300, therefore he’s a great hitter. Do you ever look at a guy’s swing before you ever see his numbers? Nice swing. Great bat speed. This guy hits .310-.330 with 20 homeruns. Let’s go test our hypothesis.

Baseball science does not have controlled experiments. It records what has happened and attempts to make conclusions. It attempts to predict, validate and discredit. It’s a reflection of the people who follow the game as much it is a reflection of the passionate, romantic fans who bleed team colors.

If you have a septic, do add those microbial solutions to it? I do every once in awhile. Problably not enough. I was able to have a new leach line dug for under a thousand dollars a couple years ago. I think I did pretty well there.

Hope the Giants can work their magic. Every once in a while, you get a Brian Wilson out of these guys. Remember when he first came up? He was just a gas thrower. Then he learned to cut it. His ascent through the big leagues is a cool story, no matter what you make of him now.

IMO, the issue isn’t did the Giants outperform a statistic, but rather, what statistics taken singlely or as a group might have predicted said outcome. The complement to that approach is to abandon those, no matter how pretty, that have no predictive value. I’d add also, the 2012 team, as opposed to the 2010 team is not, IMO, a pitch driven team. It is a defense driven team. The pitching is good not because of FIP, but precisely because the Giants pitching outcomes are critically dependent on fielding. In a funny kind of way, the Giants are like a team of knuckle ballers, where avoiding a bat isn’t the issue at all, rather it’s hitting a ball by the defense.

If you take a gander at Dave Cameron’s comments on knuckle ballers, maybe you can see where my proposition is coming from.

Not to question Bochy & Righetti (although this is a Giants blog after all), but I would personally prefer to see the left-handed dookie pitcher Zito floating softballs between the two righty fire-ballers Cain & Vogelsong in those first three important games against the blasted Dodgers, who are going to be looking FOR BLOOD in those first games; who starts in what position does not have to be some type of honor does it?

It seems to me that Cain whipping them in there one day, Zito floating them in the next and then Vogelsong smoking the corners again the next game would be the way to mess with those ducking Fodgers.

Right now I like Cain, Zito, Vogelsong, Bumgarner & Lincecum, in that order.

But I guess, at least for the moment, I’ll give the benefit of the doubt to ‘ol Boch.

I remember being at AT&T just before the season started with a lone player, #75, throwing out in left field while his teammates were in Oakland. I was hoping and praying that Z would turn into a serviceable starter until Vogelsong got off the DL. Little did I know that, months later, I’d be thanking Tom House as the Giants won start after glorious Zito start. Hearing that his teammates chanted “Barry, Barry” sent chills down my spine. How far that man came last year! And the Giants haven’t lost a Zito start in how many games now? Let’s keep the streak alive in game #4 against the Cards.

This is good stuff CC. So RA9 wins it is. There’s a lot to digest and dinner is almost ready. I’ll get back on it. But I like it so far.

FIP not perfect. Good for population studies, not as good for individiual subjects. So FIP needs a little tweaking and it is good to go. Get it back in your shop and we’ll plug it in when it’s fixed. The final product should be able to say with some certainty that if X pitcher threw the 2013 season 100 times, his ERA would be #.##. That would be cool, I suppose.

Footy@717 😉 not really – it is Not what everybody does when talking baseball. I’m starting to skip over cuz they’re to laboratory oriented type analysis.

Managers and coaching staffs are not always the sharpest crayons in the box.

Eye balls, strategies and matchups are useful but Moooooooooose is correct. Too much cherry picking. Your analysis might be important or important to you but the game is still played on the diamond with round ball and oblong bat by freakishly athletic men.

I’m not able to dicepher your often sterile paper statistics. How did the game survive during its Golden Era, the best by the way, before all the pin heads started entering every stat into a computer brain.

How did Christy Mathewson or Carl Hubbell survive without the Fips and other Saber stuff.

I remember my Cardinal friends laughing at me. Telling me the Giants luck was over and how the Cards where going to thrash Zito. I told them that they better not Zito beat them… Cause if he did it was over. We all know what happened next.

CC- the stat heads have been confused by Cain for years- BABIP is supposed to vary each year but Cain has been consistent with “the lowest BABIP of any pitcher in the 21st century” (Baseball Prospectus). Cain’s
results have happened when the Gs had good and bad defenses,

As a traveling Giants fan who happened to be at an early August regular season game when Barry Zito beat Lance Lynn on a warm St. Louis night, a game that turned out to be the first in his still on-going streak of “I-take-the-mound-the-Giants-win,” I will still admit to this day my surprise at his post-season exploits. The performance in Game 1 of the WS vs. Verlander was very, very good, but that game # 5 vs. St. L. absolutely floored me. Through it all, though, Barry Zito never quit and quite rightly never paid too much attention to fans like me. As he’s said of the bad times, Twitter became pretty rough on him; so now that he’s a Twitter god, it’s just as well he’s not paying attention to it now. Just pitch and compete, that’s his deal; he doesn’t worry about results, which is awfully rare in major league sports, but I have to say I sometimes wish I could also be more process-oriented. The reality is as wonderful as ’10 and ’12 are the real deal for the Giants and us fans is their all-out commmittment to the pursuit of winning. If they actually do that, we as fans actually have very little to complain about even if they come up short. Zito gets that, and I realize, he always has.

A start or two after that St Louis game Zito had a start against the D’Backs where he was lights out for the first four innings, Chris Johnson hit a two run homer in the fifth and things unraveled for him and the pen after that. Amazingly Giants came back and won the game, but the stuff Zito had in the first four innings of that game was the best stuff I’d ever seen him have as a Giant, so even though folks on this site were saying “same old bad Zito”, I knew better and in fact I wrote here before his next start that if he throws like he did against the D’Backs he’ll be fine. I think that next game he took a shut out into the 9th against the Braves.

I looked up Zito’s contract- in 6 years with the As he always pitched over 200 innings per year- in the past 6 years with the Gs he has never pitched over 200 innings per year. However, if he pitches 200 innings or more in 2013, the Giants are forced to pay him $18 million for 2014- or buy him out for $7 million. If he somehow pitches like he did with Oakland, it will be interesting to see what happens in September- Sabean/Bochy may be in a conflict situation. Scott Boras will be watching.

A blind mouse sometimes finds cheese. I’ll never be a Zito fan. 5+ years of legendary failures are not erased with a run of pretty good starts to close the ’12 regular season. Let us not forget that Zito’s NLDS start vs. Reds – NOT good – Timmy saved his bacon. The NLCS Zito start and WS Game 1 start were awesome but again a blind mouse sometimes finds a morsel of food.

Do not let Zito get 200 innings. I could think of 100 pitchers I’d rather pay 1/3 of $20M for their 2014 services. Thanks for 2 great playoff starts Zito in ’12 but I’m arealist..give the 2013 team a 3.80ERA, 160 innings, and a 14-12 record and Giants will be doing just fine.

Zito starts are pins and needles. I’m never comfortable. I always anticipate the big inning. I like being pleasantly surprised though. It is pleasing to watch him waive his magical wand at hitters. Hit this slow bender, I dare ya. Gonna carve up your hands with my 83 cutter. Back off. That’s my plate. Art, not science.

Marty comes on at 10 a.m. Game at noon California time on KNBR. Lineup is out–Perez playing LF, Arias at SS, Pill at 1B, Belt at DH! Belt hitting 7th after Arias–lefty starter for Angels?

Just keep Cousins away from Buster.

Yeah, as for the Warriors’ win–first in FIVE years vs. San Antonio–my brother and I were joking about whether it was their new “fashion statement” unis or the absence of Bogut. And the Spurs were on the second night of a back-to-back, and the game went into OT. But the Warriors played really well, great defense–especially Klay Thompson on Tony Parker (held him to 18 points and three assists, not bad). It was especially impressive when they got down 80-67 with about nine minutes to go and reeled off a 13-0 run. Jack was amazing, and David Lee was incredible. The Bogut thing may have affected Lee the most–without Bogut, Lee’s just in there fighting for every board. I think they haven’t quite figured out how to play together yet.

What’s Bochy doing to the kid? That’s no way to instill confidence. Showing his doubts already. Belt will have to fight for his job at first base again. Looks like Pill is in the lead on day one. Collective sigh of frustration.

All kidding aside, I would think guys who need more AB’s would be up front in the lineup. But I suppose Belt would get his 2 AB’s then rest no matter what.

I wonder what Chris Dominguez will bring to the table. With Gillaspie gone, third base opens back up for him. Can he make enough contact to stick around?

More contact is what Roger Kieschnick needs also. He’s got to trim the strike outs. 27% rate last year which is not deathly horrible, but needs work. The 10% walk rate is a saving grace for him. Nate Schierholtz with power, more K’s, more walks. Giants will take that in a heartbeat.

Zito lives and dies with the ump. If the ump is tight and can’t call a curve, Zito fails, if the ump is loose and calls where a ball crosses the plate, he is golden. Krukow analysis of umps and how they call games is usually highly improtant to how the pitcher succeeds or fails. Mot umps can not call a curve.

Foothills: Is Chris Dominguez even in camp this year? He isn’t on the 40-man, and I didn’t see his name on the NRI list, either. He seems to have fallen off the map. I remember seeing him in some spring training games last year.

After Gillaspie got traded, I read that third base in spring training will be manned by Arias, Adam Duvall, and Brett Pill(!) once Pablo leaves for the WBC.

25 years 3 homes and never used any microbes. Depending on quantity in houses and use, pump every 3 years. Solids stay in the tank. Sandy soil is great for leaching clay is not. Depending on where the lines are ran relative to trees, you are better off periodically using the root shock stuff that prevents the roots from clogging the leach lines.

$1,000 great price if it includes the drain rock , drain pipes and permits

People are giving 2 much credit to Zito. His final 14 games he had a 4.69 ERA. The Giants went 11-3 in those starts. THey averaged 5 runs a game over that span. Coincidentally they average 5 runs a game after the allstar break vs 3.9 runs per game before the allstar game.

Pitching down the stretch was not great, hitting was phenominal and that was what was overlooked by most out east.

Perez the guy to really watch for #5 OF. .782 OPS in the pitcher friendly Eastern League. That OPS probably translates to .850 in the PCL. He’s 26 and more seasoned than others (so is Cole Gillespie) and less in need of those reps in AAA. Guys like Peguero, Brown and Kieschnick are going to need regular AB’s.

Did you read Woj above? I just had a thought… Here on the blog, I think Woj and JD4SF are like Archie and Edith! And, I have a place in my heart for both… I love JD’s wonderful optimism…just LOVE it and I often need to be reminded of that perspective. Woj is like my devil-on-the-shoulder reminding me, in no uncertain terms, what could go wrong.

So excited to listen to the soothing sounds of Cactus League ball to prime my pump for the real deal….drove past AT&T yesterday on my way to an appointment, and got JAZZED. Love our boys!

Did you read Woj above? I just had a thought… Here on the blog, I think Woj and JD4SF are like Archie and Edith! And, I have a place in my heart for both… I love JD’s wonderful optimism…just LOVE it and I often need to be reminded of that perspective. Woj is like my devil-on-the-shoulder reminding me, in no uncertain terms, what could go wrong.

+++++

Thank you Matthew for unconditional love. What the world needs most 🙂

I can be cynic and a skeptic and an a-whole from time to time; nauseating as well. But knowing your love is unconditional is comforting.

There’s all sorts of ROYGBV within black, orange, home whites and road grays.

Some things never get old. Some things really do. I don’t get dissing Zito now. Before 2013 even begins? After what he did in 2012?

I remember Oct 19, 2012 as a really fun, very exciting night of Giants baseball on this blog. #RallyZito was going on. At 5 this morning (my dog got me up at a quarter till), I re-read all the Oct 19 blogs and comments. There were some downers in the comments, but not many. ClutchUp finally told one person to “go away.” Which was funny then, and now.

Alex wrote about Zito in his post-game blog:

“Yet here he is, on October 19, pitching the game of his life to keep the Giants alive one off-speed pitch and low-80s mph fastball at a time.

“He was pitching. He was raising the eye level,” Cardinals manager Mike Matheny said. “He was in the top of the zone, just above, on the edges. He was moving in and out, back and forth. He was taking speeds off his breaking ball and changeup. That’s what pitching is.”

Zito has figured that out, and at the perfect time. He didn’t find a fix in that bullpen session in Scottsdale, but when the lights went on a few days later, Zito was magnificent. Friday, he was better.

“One run probably would have been enough with Zito pitching the way he did,” shortstop Crawford said.

True, but the Giants got him a few runs anyway. And Zito, given some breathing room, breezed through the night…

Zito threw in a beauty of a run-scoring bunt, too…”

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There’s a reason all the other guys chanted ““Bar-ry! Bar-ry!” in Detroit. Because that night in St. Louis, Zito got them back to San Francisco, and the Giants were on their way.